Realer than Reality

    For purposes of this post, let's pretend that I'm a famous blogger who everyone reads. I assume that anyone who read yesterdays post think's that I'm a conspiracy theorist. And I suppose I probably am, I'm just one of those people who doesn't bother to follow the trendy conspiracies. What kind of writer would I be if I settled for someone else's fantasy instead of trying to make my own? I'm not going to say that I'm a sane person who only believes in the things she can prove scientifically, because I most certainly am not that, but I will say that I don't think society will survive if we vilify belief. All of us believe in things. Not just because it's instinctive, but because our society depends on it. I'm not wholly unconvinced that the reason we teach our kids to believe in Santa Claus at a young age is to teach them how to believe in things that you can't prove, even if the logic isn't sound. I won't pretend this isn't problematic, since we have an entire coming of age ritual around realizing that Santa isn't real, but I use it as an example of how, deep down, most of us know the world we live in isn't real. The social part, anyways. 

     I don't think that all of us should believe that reality as an external, objective concept isn't real. I'm not saying we should doubt our own senses (although there are a lot of scientific studies that say exactly that), because I think the opposite is true. I think that when a world has crumbled to the point that we have to doubt everything we see lest we hurt someone, that's a sign that a world needs to be destroyed and replaced with a world that can be believed in safely. I think the purpose of reality, society, anything that you have to believe in for it to be real, is to protect people from seeing or thinking about the Infinite. I think that the reason so many have flocked to conspiracies is that they can't believe in society anymore, so there isn't much protecting them from the Infinite. 

    Science, wonderful in it's ability to enable progress, is so tied into reality that one can't really "believe" in it. Science is the only real tool we have to see what reality is, and except for crazy people like me, everyone agrees that reality exists and that we live in it and shouldn't question it. In order to believe in something, you have to be able to question it, to know that it either might not be true or probably isn't true at all. It's why society is less "real" than earth, because we know that society isn't real, but most of us go along with it because we benefit from believing in it, and not questioning those who run it. No one benefits from questioning reality, we just question how much we really know about it. 

     I think that it's time we start questioning our relationship to reality, specifically the part where we believe that someday we'll understand it entirely and we'll never have to question anything for the rest of our lives. First off, I don't think that's possible. Our Universe is too big for that. Second, I think that if we focus only on what's "real", we'll miss out on the things that matter most to us, the worlds that we build in our minds. I look at the rise of occultism, conspiracies, even people who are just questioning the virtues of capitalism, and I see the same thing. They're all looking for something to believe in, a back up for their reality, someplace else to protect them from the Infinite. I think that, even if objective, external reality exists and isn't just a product of an entire Universe of entities bringing it into existence, we aren't going to be able to live in it as much as we would like. We'd be a lot better off learning to build our own worlds to live in, worlds that are built to be more than places of profit or escapes from painful life experiences. We need to build worlds that are, in their own way, realer than reality.